In June 2009, our service for the selection of auto-instructors for the first time declared itself to the community , received a lot of useful comments that convinced us that we were on the right path, largely due to them defining our further development.

Those few of you, who during this time our resource was useful for personal purposes, may be interested to know about the financial results of our project, and about the difficulties that we have encountered. For the rest, it may help not to step on a rake, inventing a niche for such a business, without studying the mentality of the “wards”. After all, contact with the audience is very important for a young startup.
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So why are we still alive? Carefully, under the cut is really great text.

Problems

1) Low site traffic, as a result, all auto-instructors posted on our site receive few calls

Since the launch, we have grown to 2,000 unique visitors per day, providing about 9,000 hits per day. At the same time, according to Google Analytics, the return percentage is only 30%, which is understandable - it makes sense to use our resource 1-2 times in life, it does not count on a permanent audience. This could be an advantage, for example, in a dialogue with advertisers, but so far we have only negative experience, more details below.

You can speculate on the fact that one of our instructors "did not come out with a mug", tritely uploaded not his most successful photo (and we haven’t helped him in this yet), set too high a price for training, or just in his area a lot of competition, but in fact, from month to month, for almost half a year, we have already formed a limited number of instructor questionnaires, which is not growing, but which receives calls, and, accordingly, pays us for its placement.

Nevertheless, every day at least 1 new instructor is registered, and only a part of them after passing the free trial period of 1.5 months remain with us on a fee basis. The rest fall off for various reasons.

We spent a lot of effort, now we know what percentage of users actually make calls, found a clear correlation with attendance, a lot of analytical work was done for this, many reports were built, the center worked from morning to night without working on the pipe. As a result, we found out that by slightly increasing the attendance it is possible to provide at least 1 guaranteed call per month to an instructor. And for them it is a criterion of payback and usefulness of our resource, since students take an average of 5 lessons.

The cost of SEO over this period has only grown, and if earlier we were counting on the appearance of natural links, then, by observing the emergence of links of such a plan “I found a great instructor myself here, ” we quickly parted those hopes.

2) Stereotypes

When we first started, we had a lot of unpleasant conversations with competing sites. On the basis of the fact that we borrowed information about the autoinstructors from their sites, of course, calling around the instructors and asking for permission (remember, personal information about a particular person belongs only to that person). This was perceived, to put it mildly, in hostility, there were provocations and other attempts to deceive naive auto-instructors who were not familiar with the rules of the Network.

What is the result: some of these sites began to cooperate with us, taking the initiative. Among them appeared “intermediaries”, people who collected money from other instructors who were not friends with the Internet, and placed it on our website with a certain discount depending on the number of “given” instructors. Everyone benefits, in principle.

Despite this, the majority of instructors never got used to the idea that one site with all instructors is better than 100 personal pages on narod.ru. Some of them, in principle, do not believe in online advertising, they have enough students to fall for at the expense of word of mouth, work in a driving school, someone generally perceives all this in his own way, and rushes to make his personal website. We manage to preserve the technological advantage, so the 3 clone sites that have appeared during this period (already with the trained instructors from our site!) Have so far not achieved anything.

3) Low price

We realized that we rested on the bar - somehow not raising the price, not increasing the number of satisfied instructors, not associating with advertising or cooperation with driving schools that we dreamed of, we could not count on an increase in income.

It is clear that just to raise the price we at least do not allow conscience. I wanted to launch new services, announce a new price only for newly connecting instructors, and under this simple cover make a migration of the population to a new, profitable for us, tariff.

In more detail about our attempts to earn we read in the next section.

Solutions

1) Attempts to dialogue with driving schools

After all, we promised a functionality similar to autobeginner.ru at the time of launch. But first it was necessary to work the soil.

A rating of driving schools was made, with which it would make sense to communicate, there were attempts to communicate by phone, e-mail, even through Odnoklassniki directly with the director of the Central Driving School. All attempts to contact - both on the wall. It is time for a personal visit, to break through with the fight, so to speak. Here your humble servant felt all the work of a traveling salesman. We prepared a presentation on the disk, which we expected to leave to the secretary as a last resort if we could not see the persons in charge. I must say that a common practice among directors of driving schools was the “day of attendance” and “the office hours by appointment.”

This is what happened:


View the presentation .
The contact eventually took place (solely due to the connections of one of our instructors), from which we found out the main thing: driving schools treat private instructors so badly that even the neighborhood on one site will jar on them. We have buried this idea safely until better times, wishing good luck through autobeginner.ru.

2) Offline advertising in order to increase attendance

We were sure that our instructors would be happy to replace their car frames with a number on ours, these are:



We can say that we were wrong. Instructors are interested in advertising only their beloved. As a result, only I myself and a couple of people drive with this frame.

Now we have an idea to create booklets / leaflets with basic fines for violating traffic rules, on the back of which there will be something like a coupon for a free lesson with an instructor. We plan that students will give such coupons to our instructors, and those that they are not so offensive to work for free, will compensate part of the subscription fee by entering the number from this coupon in their personal account on our website. We plan to distribute through a rack with a free press at gas stations, well, on the streets, in traffic jams. We still do not know what this venture will turn around. Maybe habrachelovek you dissuade us in advance?

3) What future decisions now warm our hope? We plan to do this next half a year.

• redesign Reducing the bounce rate, working with content, simplifying the interface;
• work with advertisers. It seems to us that car navigation manufacturers and driving schools are our most potential advertisers;
• offline meetings with our instructors. We will photograph them ourselves, talk about coupons, hand frames to a number, etc.
• redistribution of the budget for SEO, taking into account not just real conversions, but the effectiveness of each request in the context of the final calls to auto-instructors;
• the launch of a new tariff, the introduction of restrictions that will allow us to rely on paying 100% of the time per month (we have daily debits, it is possible to pay less per month subscription fee);
• the introduction of a new service for auto-instructors, the creation of personal third-level domains of the form instructor_name.spokoino.ru, a business card generator.
• the launch of payment in St. Petersburg, now there is already a decent audience;
• fight against anonymous reviews by using openid.

Financial results

Considering what we had, and we still have a fairly loyal investor to us, we are still alive. If the studio, the product of which is our project spokoino.ru, would not have been engaged in parallel work, it would have nothing to eat. We still do not feel great joy from the occupation, because expectations, unfortunately, did not materialize. After all, when we started, and thought to start or not at all for the project, the picture looked more than rosy, due to the high, on average, sites, solvency indicators of instructors. But there was a crisis, it is no secret that he struck on the automotive theme, along with it thoughts about banning surrender on the rights of “external”, revocation of licenses from driving schools without equipped autodromes, etc., are in general not a pleasant situation , and the development of young services, it is clearly not conducive. But enough about us. After all, the purpose of this revelation:

• discourage you from hasty conclusions about the success of a business, thinking about creating such a thing;
• reveal the mystery of the veil over the still floundering startup;
• find new partners in your face;
• discourage us from subsequent mistakes, confirming our rich experience;
• find a person among you for a job as a designer / illustrator / interface designer in one person, instead of a designer who left us at Yandex (by the way, over the past three years, two more of our former employees have gone to Yandex programmers).

Plans

Of course, we have achieved certain indicators. It is nice to see how the implemented changes contribute to the financial result for the month. About 1,000 comments have already been left on our site, which we carefully, but not always successfully, moderate, with our help thousands of students have already found a worthy auto-instructor. About 600 instructors passed through our hands, which the market itself divided into groups of successful, and not so much. We finally understood the mentality of our audience, plunged into the subject until the very end. All this, in any case, is an excellent experience, only for the sake of which it is already possible to start a business.

Most likely, we will not give up, because the investor wants to recapture the money spent. Perhaps some of our plans will finally work, and everything will be in chocolate. But even according to the most optimistic forecasts, the project itself will not be able to profitably feed the entire army of employees, implying the emergence of new, profitable projects. If you have any ideas that you want to implement with our help (including our investor, I think, you will not refuse to participate in them) - feel free, offer. Waiting for feedback to info@spokoino.ru

And thank you, habrachelovek, for reading this great article. God forbid, there will be more.

PS While writing, February was the most successful in terms of profit. Whether the season started, or the article worked :)